Lorenzo The Magnificent
Bertrand Zobrist is a fictional character created by American author Dan Brown, the main antagonist in Brown’s novel Inferno.
Zobrist is a genetic engineer and Swiss billionaire. He doesn’t appear physically in the narrative given that his suicide takes place prior to the novel’s events. Instead, he is only seen in flashbacks of other characters, like the Provost, the head of the Consortium, a shadowy consulting group.
Personality
Bertrand was a brilliant scientist and madman obsessed with Dante’s Inferno.
He intended to solve the world’s overpopulation problem by releasing a virus that would wipe out a large proportion of the human race. He cited the “Doomsday Argument,” a probabilistic argument that allegedly predicts the number of future members of the human species based on an estimation of the total number of humans alive.
The plague that Zobrist created is revealed to be a vector virus that randomly activates to employ DNA modification to cause sterility in 1/3 of humans, thereby reducing population growth to a more stable level.
He approached his colleague Dr. Sinskey, the director-general of the World Health Organization, with his population control scheme, but she dismissed him for being a madman.
With agents from the World Health Organization and the Consortium at his heels, he drivo himself underground, literally beneath Florence, on account of the hatred he had garnered.
Zobrist contacted his employees through a webcam, using the Dante death mask as his cover.
He said that he had no fear of dying and would end up like Jesus as a martyr and that he was only trying to save humanity, not destroy it. He referred to himself as “The shade” because of his suicidal views and his ability to remain invisible.
When the Consortium pursued him through Florence one morning, he ran toward Piazza di San Firenze, the Bargello, ascended to the Badia church roof, and proclaimed they would never find his virus. With that, he stepped off the roof to his death. This is where Dan Brown’s thrilling Inferno begins.
In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust…before the world is irrevocably altered.
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I’m just reading Dan Brown’s Inferno now, December 2016. I’m halfway through. Thank you so much for all the symbols, people, explanations, and sights you have revealed, which have made my reading this book more meaningful. If Zobrist’s vector virus DOES randomly make 1/3 of people sterile, it is the ideal solution to a very real problem of over-population. I haven’t got to that part yet, but if such a vector virus could be made by real scientists, it could help save all of us without causing loss of life. The problem of overpopulation and lack of resources is very real and very frightening and can happen really quickly. I, personally, never had children and didn’t want children, and at age 30, I couldn’t have children. Other people make that decision, too. However, especially in 3rd World countries, where people have the LEAST RESOURCES of any other places, they have too many children without the means to raise them. These children lead miserable lives and are often sold to human sex traffickers. Even here in the USA, the least educated people often have the most children that they cannot support, so they overburden the taxpayers by getting welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, free ER services, etc. These children go on to be the same as their mothers-no fathers in their situations, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and on and on. Very few ever make good and contribute. This is my humble opinion. The problem of overpopulation is REAL. I hope someone comes up with such a vector virus!!! As a Cnristian, I cannot condone abortion, when birth control or the morning after pill is so available. Now I have to read the rest of the book and see what happens.
Rosa, thank you so much for your feedback!